Scopes

Each Petite bean has its scope. Within the bean scope there is one and only one instance associated with the bean name. Scopes are defined during the registration and container then maintains instances within the scopes. When bean is lookuped by its name, Petite will return instance that is unique for bean's scope.

Petite supports several scopes. It is possible and easy to create new, custom ones.

Two most common and used scopes are: ProtoScope and SingletonScope. The SingletonScope is the default scope, used when no scope is specified explicitly. Beans of this scope are unique for the whole Petite container and will be instantiated by container only once. On the other hand, beans of ProtoScope are instantiated every time when lookuped.

Scope is defined during bean registration:

PetiteContainer petite = new PetiteContainer();
petite.registerBean(Foo.class, null, ProtoScope.class, null, false);
petite.registerBean(Bar.class, null, null, null, false);

or, alternatively:

registry.bean(Foo.class).scope(ProtoScope.class).register();
registry.bean(Bar.class).register();

Now, each time when foo is retrieved from the container, a new instance of Foo class will be created. And each time Petite will inject the same instance of Boo class, since scope of boo bean is (implicitly set as) SingletonScope.

Available scopes

Here is the list of available Petite scopes:

• ProtoScope - beans are created each time requested.

• SingletonScope - beans are singletons for the container.

• SessionScope - beans are singletons in current HTTP session. To have this feature, the RequestContextListener must be used.

• ThreadLocalScope - beans are unique in the current thread.

Using session scope

In order to use SessionScope (in a servlet container), the following listeners has to be added to the web.xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<web-app ...>
    ...
    <listener>
        <listener-class>
            jodd.servlet.RequestContextListener
        </listener-class>
    </listener>
    ...
</web-app>

Using session scope outside of container

When container has session scope beans, it can't be used out of servlet container. This makes testing outside of container hard. However, Petite has one nice feature: it is possible to register scopes manually. In regular use case, it is not necessary to deal with scopes registration, since scopes will be resolved and instantiated on their first usage. Anyhow, it is possible to register specific scope instance for any scope that will be used instead of required one.

For example, it is possible to replace session scope with the singleton scope, what is usually enough for the tests:

PetiteContainer petite = new PetiteContainer();
petite.getManager().registerScope(SessionScope.class, new SingletonScope());

Now all session scope beans will be registered within singleton scope, assuming there is one and only one, big session.